The Most Undervalued Personal Asset

In almost every instance of my life, civilian and military, people have always bemoaned the lack of this one thing. I’ll give you a little riddle. 

It’s yours but you can’t control it. You are always losing it and can’t get more of it. It’s not tangible nor is it visible, but we have devised ways to observe it.  What am I?

I know, not the most difficult riddle in the world. Our time, in my opinion, is the most undervalued asset we possess. I remember growing up hearing my father say, “There isn’t enough time in the day” or “where did the time go?” As a child, I didn’t really grasp the implications of those statements. Now, I do. 

How often do you stop to think about time and how we use it?

When I served in the U.S. Army, we did a thing called ‘backwards planning’, where you start with your decided endpoint/objective and move backwards in time so you can account for all the things you need to get accomplished. At the end of the process, you find yourself at the specific time in which you need to start completing tasks to get where you want to be.

You do this everyday but just don’t think about it. Need to be at work by 0830? You plan to leave home by 0745, knowing that it takes 10 minutes to stop for coffee, and 20 minutes from the coffee shop to get to work. Planning to have dinner ready by 1730? That lasagna takes around and hour to bake, and roughly 40 minutes to prep. You might want to start getting things going by 1500.

During my more than a decade of service in uniform, this practice enabled me to look at time in a different way. Ultimately, I came to the understanding that we misuse this asset that we have quite a bit of. 

Think about your day. To make it easy, let’s subtract the eight hours of sleep you get and the eight hours you spend at work. What do you do in the remaining eight? Ask yourself this question and be honest, do you really not have enough time to complete your goals? 

I recall hearing a conversation at work one day about how much stuff a guy had to get done when he got home, the usual chores that can eat up some time. I didn’t really give the conversation a second thought until the following day I heard him tell another guy about the football game he watched, and a movie after.

My initial thought was, how can we complain about not having enough time to get things done if we can burn five or more ours on entertainment? Don’t get me wrong, all work and no play makes Jonny a dull boy. Make time to recharge your batteries. But think about it. If we are being honest with ourselves, we would really just admit that we don’t prioritize the thing we say we supposedly care about. 

To try to teach my daughters about time, I wait until I hear them complaining about doing chores. These are the typical things expected of a pre-teen: dishes, laundry, and cleaning their room. They will gripe about the time spent doing these things they don’t want to do, and I will tell them to do something the next time they are tasked with those things. “Time yourself,” I say to them. By now, they understand completely where I am going with this when I say it. 

In doing this, I am trying to drive the point home about how much time is actually spent doing something like that. In the eight hours or so we allocate for our usual vocations, how long does it take to unload a dishwasher or vacuum? How long does it really take to take out the trash? Here is a hint, much less than it does to watch the game!

This exercise is useful because it eliminates an excuse that we use almost everyday, “I don’t have enough time.” The reality is that we do have enough time. 

Think about that thing you have always wanted to do. It could be anything; build that bookcase, write a book, prepare that patch of land for gardening, build a raised bed, or budget and plan to get out of debt. As we sit there watching the TV, our excuse haunts us. “I don’t have time for that right now,” we tell ourselves. “I’ll do that on the weekend when I don’t have to go to work,” we proclaim. All the while, we know at least two things to be true: we do have the time, and we just don’t care enough at the moment to do them. 

Please don’t misunderstand this. I am not saying that we should slave away every waking minute of the day to work. However, I am saying that if you have set a goal that you are working towards and you are able to carve out six hours every Saturday for College Football, lack of time is not your issue. 

This exercise is helpful to shake us out of a mental and motivational slumber. It will enable you to understand that the actual issue is that you don’t really care enough about that goal to allocate time to do it. Think about a friend you know that is always talking about doing something: going to the gym to lose that 10 pounds they have been talking about, painting that extra bedroom, learning a second language, or trying their hand at guitar. There is a reality to these things. If they meant that much to them, they would do them. Period. 

Stop lying to yourself, you do have the time. You are not too busy. 

Get in the practice of owning your time. If you want to spend it entertaining yourself, okay. That’s cool, but don’t use the excuse that you don’t have enough to complete that task that’s been on your list for weeks. If you like to spend your extra time sleeping or lounging around, that’s great as well. Just be honest with yourself about why you are not completing your goals.